With the convention on-hold, I made a pilgrimage to the Mall of America this morning, and I mean it as no insult to say that the Metro Twin Cities area is what New Jersey would have been like had everything gone right. In any event, the MoA is a place of many wonders, not the least of which is its indoor theme park, which features not one, not two, but three roller-coasters. For coaster geeks, one of them–Sponge Bob Square Pants’ Rock Bottom Plunge–is notable. The Rock Bottom Plunge is manufactured by the German coaster firm Gerstlauer and is a wonderful pocket-version of big-time looping, twisting coasters you see at a Six Flags or Universal Studios. The ride contains a loop, a negative-g-hump, an inline-loop, a heartline-spin, an overbanked curve and a helix. But here’s the amazing part–it does all of these maneuvers using a start-height of about 70 feet (Wikipedia says its 67 feet tall, the Gerstlauer site says 74 feet, my eye couldn’t tell the difference) and with an incredibly small foot-print–remember, this is all inside a mall.
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